Excerpt from The Rock of Chickamauga The fifes had ceased their shrilling. The hoarse thunder of the drums had rolled away with the wet night wind, westward blowing. Through tautened canvas, here and there, on the pasture lands along the stream, the dull glow of candle light, the murmur of many voices, told of human occupancy where the week before the brood-mares and their spindle-shanked offspring were the only authorized tenants. Flitting about the company streets, like fireflies, the lanterns of the orderlies darted from point to point, bringing up invariably with sudden stop at the rthward edge of the populous rectangle, and gruff voices could be faintly heard anuncing such and such a company all present, sir, with occasional variation. Tattoo roll-call, as kwn in the old army, was just over. A typical regiment of western volunteers was getting ready to go to bed. The adjutant, muffled in the cumbersome cape overcoat of the Civil War days, stood trickling rain-drops on the open space well forward from the colonels tent, and to him the company commanders were in turn doing unwilling deference and making the final report of the day. The Old Man, as they styled their new colonel, would so have it and they could but obey. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.